The Literary Tourist is a column of conversations between literary translators about newly released books in translation. This month Andrea Gregovich interviews poet, editor, and Chinese translator Canaan Morse. Canaan co-founded the literary journal Pathlight: New Chinese Writing as its first poetry editor, won the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation in 2014, and has published translations and book reviews in several international journals, both print and online. The Invisibility Cloak, a captivating experimental novel by Ge Fei, is Canaan’s first translated book.

Andrea Gregovich:The Invisibility Cloak feels unique to me—a Beijing-based freelance designer of custom sound systems for wealthy people takes a sketchy job that goes awry, and trouble ensues. Its narrative is a patchwork of classical music discussion, shop talk about audio components, and the political and philosophical opinions of various characters. Did you detect any literary influences when you were working on this book? Does it fit into any literary trends in China?

Canaan Morse: I’m so glad you asked this question, because my answer is a resounding “No.” While much of the earlier, experimental fiction upon which Ge Fei built his reputation is deeply (and clearly) influenced by American Modernism, his later fiction speaks with a much more individualized voice. This book in particular leaves an aesthetic impression unlike any other; its terse yet suddenly mellifluous narrative style and its embrace of suspense distinguish it clearly from all the English and Chinese literature I’ve read.

AG: How did you end up translating this as your first novel?

CM: To use a baseball metaphor, I looked this ball all the way into the glove. In 2011, I was working with Eric Abrahamsen to bring Paper Republic, a Chinese literary translation community turned publishing business, off the ground and into the world. That August, I sat down at the Beijing International Book Fair with a young Chinese editor friend from a literary house. When I asked her what she had going, she said, “You know, Ge Fei’s just come out with a new book. It’s kind of weird; I don’t really like it that much.” I had known and appreciated Ge Fei’s work for a while, and when she gave her opinion, something in my brain clicked. If a mainstream editor tells you a book is “weird,” it’s probably worth checking out.

I took a copy home and stayed up until 3 a.m. to finish it—the first time in years a book had hooked me so hard. I loved the language, sympathized with the people, and felt caught up by the story. I did a sample translation, Paper Republic pushed the book hard, and we caught the interest of Jeffrey Yang, the well-known poet and editor at New York Review of Books. When Jeffrey asked me to translate the whole thing, I couldn’t say no. I wanted to carry the project from start to finish.

AG: I only caught one instance of the title “The Invisibility Cloak” in the novel, and it was an offhanded mention of a celebrity tycoon who was rumored to have an invisibility cloak. Is there a larger theme at work here, or is this an avant garde thing?

CM: To paraphrase Ge Fei’s own words, this book is about people who stubbornly build and protect their own individual subjectivity in a society that doesn’t value individualism at all. The protagonist, Mr. Cui, makes conscious choices to define himself according to what he loves—classical music and hi-fi sound systems—and establish his identity and daily routine on that foundation. Those numberless choices force him away from society, allowing him to don an “invisibility cloak” of sorts. On another level, of course, the invisibility cloak symbolizes the willful marginalization of rural migrants in contemporary Chinese urban society, as an increasingly rigid social hierarchy pushes artisans and laborers out of public view. So the “invisibility cloak” is something one can put on oneself as well as others. I think that story about wealthy eccentric Mou Qishan is intended as an instructive example.

AG: Some of the fiction I translate has a lot of technical and mechanical language in it, stuff that is completely beyond my expertise, and I find I have to get creative with my research and resources to make sure I’m accurately translating it. In this book it isn’t just the specs of things like speakers and cables that seem difficult—there are also complex sentences about acoustics, like “Sound waves bounce off the glass to create interference that ruins the final stereo imaging effect.” Was it a challenge for you to translate a novel with so many precise audiophile descriptions? Did you use any interesting resources, online or otherwise?

CM: I read blueprints for Tannoy Autograph speakers in order to understand what they look like and how the “dual concentric core” actually works. I read circuit diagrams to the best of my ability, and crawled down rabbit holes of online manuals, sales catalogues, and BBS postings to find the proper English names of the parts he mentioned. As is so often the case, real information is found in untagged, disposable media. That kind of detective work is, honestly, my favorite part of translation. It’s unbelievable how much you learn.

AG: It’s also a book full of wise moments. One of my favorites was when Mr. Cui, the main character, is telling his client Bai Cheng’en, a lawyer, about how everyone in the community of audio connoisseurs is so morally good, he’s never had a problem with payment. He correlates this goodness with their appreciation for classical music, but his client bursts his bubble: “You know, by day the Nazis sent thousands of Jews to the furnaces without batting an eyelash—they even tossed in newborn babies. But that never prevented them from kicking back in the evenings with their coffee while listening to Mozart or Chopin.” Did you have any particular favorite moments of insightful wisdom that struck you?

CM: Generally speaking, I’m not one for declamatory rhetoric. The protagonist’s everyday speech—that straightforward, blue-collar, yet emotionally flexible voice—brought me the greatest enlightenment. I had never before heard a narrative voice in Chinese that resonated so clearly with my American, working-class ideological background. The knowledge that his character—a person I know how to talk to on a spiritual level—could actually exist was certainly a revelation.

AG: When politics came up in this book I always got intrigued, because I’m rarely in a position to hear the opinions of average Chinese people on topics like climate change, America, and the role of China in the global economy. It seems like they don’t necessarily agree or disagree with American views on a given topic; they have their own unique perspective. How well do you think this book represents Chinese opinions in this way? Do you think this is some kind of a cross-section of Chinese society, or is the author making his own statement with the characters and their opinions?

CM: Beijing residents have an opinion about everything, especially when it comes to politics. While I wouldn’t dare suggest this book represents a wide cross-section of Chinese opinions in that regard, certain strains of thought are clearly present in China today. The empty talk of university intellectuals (who have to survive on empty talk) is everywhere to be seen, as is a current of popular disappointment in them for their failure to act as responsible stewards of the country (China, traditionally, has been governed by the intellectual class). Cui’s mother’s habitual passivity in the face of dangers she feels are too big to resist is also a popular sentiment among those who have neither wealth nor power. Their catchphrase is the ubiquitous mei banfa, “nothing to be done.”

AG: This book has plenty of Chinese cultural and pop cultural references, as well as lots of place names and other such details for which I really have no frame of reference. And yet I didn’t get lost in this stuff—I’m sure I missed heaps of allusions and metaphors and such, but I felt like I understood what points were being made. Was this a book where the translator has to be a kind of de facto editor, making little rewrites so that unrecognizable references are framed in a way that foreign readers can understand? Or was this readability a sign of the author’s writerly skills shining through?

CM: There shouldn’t have been too many allusions—if you felt like you understand something, you probably did. Every literary translator walks the tightrope of localization versus foreignization in the target language; do I call these meat-filled breads “dumplings,” or do I use the authentic Chinese word baozi and elucidate through context? The translator is always the text’s first editor, and a deep understanding of translation as co-creation gives us principles to adhere to as we do our work, building a context that guides interpretation and creates aesthetic effects similar to those of the source text.

What I’m trying to do, I guess, is to argue on a theoretical level that “readability” is always the result of the translator’s work without sounding boastful in this particular instance. It is impossible to read a translation in such a way as to ignore the translator’s agency, though many don’t realize that.

AG: Without giving away the ending, I think it’s fair to describe it as a last-minute plot twist, a sudden revelation in the last paragraph. Mr. Cui finally really speaks his mind and has something insightful of his own to say. Why do you think Ge Fei gave the book such a sharp turn at the very end?

CM: I’m not so sure why he chose that sharp turn in particular; there are many such turns throughout the book. I know that he wanted to incorporate suspense into the novel, in part as a response to the question “Can you really put classical music and horror together in one story?” Some cliffhangers are solved, others aren’t, and as he told an audience at Columbia University, there are some for which the clues are hidden in the text.

AG: As a literary translator in a language with an alphabet, I’ve never managed to wrap my brain around how literature in a character-based language makes the leap into English. I wonder about how things like style, humor, and irony work in Chinese, whether there’s a pictorial element in a character-based language that doesn’t translate, how you express poetic sounds of such a non-parallel language into English, stuff like that. So tell me, what is uniquely difficult about translating Chinese literary writing into English? What sorts of things get lost in translation?

CM: Chinese characters aren’t Egyptian hieroglyphs. Most are organized in phonetic systems or built around homophones, and when you look at an unfamiliar character, it’s much easier to guess how it’s pronounced than to guess what it means. The language, meanwhile, is subject to the same strains and tensions that other major languages sustain, and changes accordingly. Appreciation of the written character as an aesthetic object has all but evaporated with the advent of the word processor.

That is not to say that the language lacks distinctive characteristics, one of which I find especially interesting: the quality of time and tense. Chinese is a completely uninflected language, which means verbs do not conjugate, and nouns do not decline. Narrative time is indicated largely by the use of verbal complements, single or dual-character particles result, continuation, or other forms of change. This makes the interpretation of time highly contextual, more of a “feeling” than a direction, and this can cause real vertigo when one is working with experimental or stream-of-consciousness prose. American readers don’t like tense shifts; we equate them with bad writing. By contrast, Chinese readers are both better able to narrate the changing currents of immediacy and “pastness” and more comfortable with ambiguity, which makes their sense of narrative time much more mutable than ours.

AG: You are notorious at the ALTA (American Literary Translators Association) yearly conference as the “Chinese Vegetables Guy” because of a performance you do in Chinese of a period market vendor calling out the vegetables he has for sale. I’ve witnessed this performance twice at Declamación, the annual evening at ALTA of drinking and reciting of poetry and such, and it knocked my socks off both times. But I must confess I wasn’t quite sober either time, so I’m still fuzzy on the details of what it’s about exactly. Could you explain this performance piece you do, how you learned it, and where it comes from?

CM: I hope I haven’t worn that material out! Those short pieces—I have done two or three at each of the last two conferences—are traditional vendor’s songs from pre-modern Beijing. In the days before the supermarket, farmers and craftsmen would wander the inner alleys of the city, singing their wares. When those inside the house heard the familiar song of, say, the vegetable seller, or the knife sharpener, or the candy man, they’d run out to get what they needed.

Although most of those melodies have, of course, disappeared, they’ve survived in a form of traditional comic performance known as “cross-talk,” an art I learned and performed for about five years in Beijing. My master grew up with those sounds in his ear; cross-talk performers learn and sing them as exhibitions of traditional culture, and you can still bring a tear to the eye of a Beijing native if you “sing them right.” I’ve always been drawn to works of disappearing art; I like to think of myself as a vessel for preserving them, and I will gladly perform them for anyone who wishes to listen.

Andrea Gregovich is a writer and translator of Russian literature. Her first translated novel USSR: Diary of a Perestroika Kid was published by Fiction Advocate in 2014, and her translation of Nadezhda Belenkaya’s Wake In Winter was recently released by Amazon Crossing.

1. Game Changers: The Unsung Heroines of Sports History by Molly Schiot

This big, beautiful, illustrated hardcover offers profiles and portraits of pioneering women in sports history. Based on the Instagram account @TheUnsungHeroes, Game Changers is a dramatic record of people who shattered their glass ceilings.

2. Carry This Book by Abbi Jacobson

One of the stars of Broad City has a secret talent: drawing the imaginary contents of famous people’s personal bags. Ever wondered what Oprah carries in her purse? Abbi has some ideas.

3. The Big Book of Science Fiction, edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Ann VanderMeer

There’s something to be said for honesty. This is a big book of science fiction stories. Over 1,000 pages long, featuring classics and newcomers, edited by two of the biggest names in science fiction today, this book is the cornerstone of any good collection.

4. Some Writer!: The Story of E. B. White by Melissa Sweet

For the kid who already knows and loves Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan, this cute, illustrated biography of E. B. White will prolong the magic while educating the next generation of storytellers.

5. Sequential Drawings: The New Yorker Series by Richard McGuire

Two years ago he blew our minds with Here, a groundbreaking graphic novel that depicted the same vantage point, inside the same house, over the course of many millennia. Now he’s going small. This is a collection of Richard McGuire’s “spots” for The New Yorker—those tiny black & white drawings that fill in the cracks between articles. Each one is a subtly clever story.

6. A Ghost Story for Christmas (series), by various authors, illustrated by Seth

Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, H.G. Wells, and others wrote Christmas stories—tales of suspense and excitement for families to read to each other at the holidays. Now the artist Seth has illustrated them, and a small press in Canada is releasing them as tiny little paperbacks. They’re collectible, sharable, and very readable.

7. The Art of the Affair: An Illustrated History of Love, Sex, and Artistic Influence by Catherine Lacey and Forsyth Harmon

Original portraits of famous people, along with the other famous people they had sex with (or were inspired by). Like how you keep a map in your head of all your friends who’ve had sex with each other. Or is that just me?

8. The Vonnegut Encyclopedia by Marc Leeds

Newly expanded and revised, this is the perfect book to give that insatiable Vonnegut fan in your life, if only to shut them up. (Pairs well with Ginger Strand’s recent double biography, The Brothers Vonnegut.)

9. The Art of Archer by Neal Holman

If you love Archer, then, first of all, what’s wrong with you, second, let’s be friends, and finally, this is a pretty great book. Not only for the backstories and the Japanese hentai porn featuring Archer characters (yep), but mostly for the layer-by-layer analysis of how they build the visuals for the show. It’s pretty amazing.

10. Horace and Agnes: A Love Story by Lynn Dowling

This book is a photo essay about a horse and a squirrel who fall in love, using real people with large plastic masks to portray the various characters. I don’t know. Sometimes Christmas takes a weird turn.

Horror comedies and demon possession movies are both having a moment, but Ava’s Possessions is the first film I’ve heard of that combines these genres. Director Jordan Galland’s 2015 indie is an amusing genre mashup, but it also uses possession and exorcism as metaphors for mental illness and addiction, presenting horror not as a one-time event but as an ongoing challenge.

Ava (Louisa Krause) has just been exorcised of the demon Naphula, who possessed her for nearly a month. Rather than serving jail time or being institutionalized, Ava agrees to start attending Spirit Possession Anonymous meetings to learn how to recognize the warning signs of impending possession and avoid it in the future; as the group leader Tony (Wass Stevens) explains, being possessed once makes you ten times more likely to be possessed again. Ava befriends fellow possession recoverer Hazel (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) and starts to piece together the time she lost while under Naphula’s control in an effort to find everyone she hurt and start making amends. Her investigation leads her to a mysterious art dealer (Lou Taylor Pucci) and uncovers secrets about her family that she was perhaps better off not knowing.

For an 89-minute movie, Ava’s Possessions does not skimp on story, sometimes to its detriment. What makes the film so charming is its grasp on the ordinary; the first act, which Ava spends cleaning up her wrecked apartment and trying to make amends with her estranged friends and boyfriend, is a dryly comedic gem. The scenes at Spirit Possession Anonymous are similarly funny and thought-provoking, with different characters in various stages of the recovery process; Hazel is smitten with her demon and chatters about him to Ava like a starstruck fan describing a pop star. Galland sticks to a color palette of neon blue, yellow, and pink, giving the film a sense of cohesion even when the myriad plot threads start to go off the rails near the end of Act Two. The ending doesn’t quite come together, but getting there is so enjoyable it almost doesn’t matter. Ava’s possession will never truly leave her, but she learns to live with it and manage it with help from her sponsor and some unexpected insight from her family.

For a horror comedy with a fairly light touch, Ava’s Possessions is a surprisingly poignant, honest take on addiction and mental illness, taking the metaphor of being “not yourself” and making it literal. The story becomes a bit scattered but the tone feels right: gently comedic with a touch of self-loathing. Ava is all of us when we learn to make friends with our dark side instead of running from it.

Ashley Wells watches too many movies and welcomes recommendations for more. Leave her one here or on Twitter: @ashleybwells. Spoiler alert: she has already seen Troll 2.

Rebecca Kauffman’s debut novel, Another Place You’ve Never Been, begins with a short prologue, a story unrelated to the main cast of characters. In this haunting tale shared among the Ojibwa tribe of North Dakota, two brothers go for a swim in a murky pond. The younger boy is bitten by poisonous water moccasin snakes and later dies. In tribal lore, he becomes a spirit with transformative and healing powers; this story is repeated from neighbor to neighbor, from parent to child.

Then the children will retell the story to one another. They feel something different in each retelling. They are learning that sometimes it takes a thousand voices to tell one story.

This idea sets the tone for Kauffman’s novel, a series of loosely related stories told in multiple perspectives that consider intangible phenomena such as intuition, fate, and the power of memory. We meet Kauffman’s main character, Tracy, when she is a troubled ten-year-old visiting her father Marty over summer vacation. Marty and his girlfriend, April, live in a ramshackle place and pass their days mostly drinking and watching television. Marty also spends time boating on the nearby pond—a dirty, odorous body of water much like the lethal one in the prologue. Questionable bodies of water appear throughout the novel, implying danger and the unknown; Tracy hasn’t been taught to swim. She’s a curious, somewhat troubled child who struts around in rain boots and a yellow bikini top and relentlessly asks questions. She’s called “Mouse” by her father, lovingly, and by April, disparagingly. April is less-than-pleased by this incursion into their lives. The story culminates when she gives Marty an ultimatum (“Me or the Mouse” is the chapter’s title) and he arranges for Tracy to return home to her mother. This decision will affect the characters throughout the rest of novel.

Tracy is a shining example of Kauffman’s masterful characterizations. We follow her changes and phases: as the teenager acting out at a neighborhood sleepover, as the obnoxious relative who disrupts a cousin’s romantic night, as the thirty-something restaurant hostess who seduces a younger coworker, Greenie. Their on-again-off-again relationship stretches over several stories; an overall sense of striving for human connection tinges other stories as well. Kauffman evokes our empathy for each character, even those who seem self-sabotaging. Tracy can be misguided and destructive in her behavior, but we sympathize with her isolation and loneliness even when it seems well-deserved.

Tracy cherishes a gift from her father, a gold bracelet he sends for her thirteenth birthday. It’s the one thing that proves his regard and she brags about it, and him, to whomever will listen. The realness of the bracelet comes to symbolize her hopes for what their relationship could be but isn’t, while Marty remains oblivious to her needs.

In the past, when he’d send her jewelry, she’d always been so concerned with whether or not it was real gold, and he’d never bothered to check.

Rebecca Kauffman

In fact, Marty scavenged the jewelry from the beach with his metal detector. Over the years, he accumulates bits and pieces, never knowing the true worth of his collection. In a chapter titled “Cash For Gold,” he finally turns in the items to have something to give Tracy—too little, and too late. After a lifetime of neglecting his daughter, Marty makes some observations about his cancer diagnosis that apply equally to his emotions:

How little you could actually know about the body you’ve lived in for your whole life, how wrong you could be about your own insides.

Kauffman’s prose is spare and vivid. She knows just the right details to bring a place or a person to life. It’s fun to anticipate the connections among characters from story to story, and to watch Tracy realize how the relationship with her father has colored her choices. Many of the settings for these stories are broken towns, with crumbling buildings and boarded-up businesses; working-class neighborhoods filled with old houses, their lawns cluttered with debris. The inhabitants flounder in their relationships and yearn for brighter vistas, some excitement or a different job—often realizing, too late, what they already had. Over time, Kauffman seems to suggest, memory becomes Kodachrome and nostalgia clouds objectivity. In a particularly moving passage, Tracy remembers the last Christmas she spent with her father, as a child:

Could she recall this warm memory with such intense particularity if there was not also the same measure of love attached? 1983, when her father wore a red flannel shirt over a red cotton turtleneck and he drank black coffee. What she felt now was so pure, it was as though every emotion she’d ever had toward him had been distilled into this one moment, and the pained and joyous throbbing inside her almost felt like the beating of wings. 1983, when she knew nothing of the ways people fail each other; when she believed her father to be the best father.

Another Place You’ve Never Been is a moving, elegantly constructed tribute to human frailty and loss, and to our stubborn insistence on striving for human connection despite a slew of obstacles. In the character of Tracy, Kauffman has given us a fascinating portrait of a modern, tragic heroine, and a lens into our own darkest, most hopeful places.

Mary Vensel White is a contributing editor at LitChat.com and author of the novel The Qualities of Wood (2014, HarperCollins). Her work has appeared in The Wisconsin Review and Foothills Literary Journal. Find her online at www.maryvenselwhite.com.

“We will live!”—the last line, italics and all, of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer—is a full-throated cry for the world’s 100 million Vietnamese people, who are still largely unheard more than forty years after the end of their catastrophic war. With his new non-fiction essay collection, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Nguyen expands and elevates the Vietnamese experience to challenge the economic and political order of the world (yes, the world) and the U.S. “war machine” that he believes maintains it.

That machine encompasses not only American government and weapons makers but also their “ministry of misinformation,” Hollywood. Racist, mostly white-controlled American corporations and the people who work for them also benefit and thus perpetuate the structure. “We are all implicated, not just soldiers but a lot of people in suits and dresses,” Nguyen says in an interview.

Fortunately for his readers—especially jingoistic white Americans who could find themselves offended by some of his attitudes—Nguyen is also an engaging storyteller, piquantly observant, even larger than life. Nothing Ever Dies both engrosses and entertains, albeit in a different way than The Sympathizer. With the Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award nomination, and many other literary accolades, Nguyen achieves exactly what he asks his fellow Vietnamese and the world to do: demand an audience on the global stage to tell your own story, and listen for a change, you might learn something.

The 45-year-old author and University of Southern California associate professor grew up in San Jose, Cal., after fleeing Vietnam as a child with his parents and older brother. He does not recall fondly the eight years his family lived on San Jose’s South 10th Street in a house near downtown next to a freeway overpass. When he was a teenager, a robber held him and his parents at gunpoint in the home, a story he recounts in the 2009 short story “The War Years,” published in TriQuarterly magazine. His parents worked day and night, nearly 365 days a year, to establish a Vietnamese grocery store, only to see the city condemn their property (and dozens of other mostly Vietnamese-American-owned properties nearby) to make way for the new Civic Center in the early 2000s. Their store’s former location is now a vacant lot across from City Hall.

Nguyen is most persuasive in the early chapters of Nothing Ever Dies, when he writes about the formation of national and collective memory—not only via war memorials and Hollywood movies but also via literature, newspapers, television, radio, and magazines, “the industries of memory.” The U.S., with its massive economy and global dominance of film production and distribution, also dominates collective world memory. Nguyen writes, “Recognizing… the memory industry… enables us to see that memories are not simply images we experience as individuals, but are mass-produced fantasies we share with one another.”

In the narrow perspective of the manufacturers of war memories, soldiers (mostly men) personify combat. Yet war kills and damages women, children, the elderly, and societies at large just as often and as much. San Jose is home to the only museum in the world dedicated to remembering the former Republic of South Vietnam, its citizens and soldiers, Nguyen notes. His mother “will not be counted as one of war’s casualties but what else do you call someone who lost her country, her wealth, her family, her parents, her daughter, and her peace of mind?” The selective (or manipulated) memory symbolized by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., allows Americans to operate under the illusion that they had the greatest losses. In fact, more than 58,000 American soldiers lost their lives, but three million Vietnamese, two million Cambodians and one million Laotians died in combat and in the years immediately after the Vietnam War. “It is ethical and just to confront those numbers, and the following realities: no massacres committed on American soil, no bombs dropped on American cities, no Americans forced to become sex workers, no Americans turned into refugees,” Nguyen argues.

Both Nothing Ever Dies and The Sympathizer (and other of Nguyen’s writings) turn on the deep dualities that characterize all human existence—the humanity and inhumanity, selfishness and selflessness that every person embodies. The narrator-spy in The Sympathizer is the bastard son of a Vietnamese peasant girl and a French monk who never acknowledges his patrimony. His ever-shifting perspective (one might even say allegiance) shapes his existence and, in the end, nearly causes his insanity and demise. Only by having empathy for other people, by adopting even for a moment an enemy’s point of view, can we stop war and the death of innocents, Nguyen argues.

Nguyen has refined his observations over nearly a lifetime. The voice of the narrator of “The War Years” presages the narrator’s sarcastic humor in The Sympathizer and the cutting wit of Nothing Ever Dies, where, at one point, Nguyen simply lists 13 American-English slurs for Asians, including “Gook,” “goo-goo,” “Chink” and “slant-eyes,” in order to prove that Asians are a racial “other” within the larger culture. “I wondered if a Communist child was sleeping in my bed [in the former South Vietnam], and if so, what kind of books a Red read, and what kind of movies he saw,” muses the child in “The War Years.” “Captain America was out of the question.”

The short, semi-autobiographical story—which makes reference to San Jose’s Story and King roads, major cross-streets in its Little Saigon neighborhood—also depicts the complicated politics of the Vietnamese refugees and foreshadows the real-life political brouhaha at San Jose City Hall in 2007 over the naming of a Vietnamese district on the city’s east side. With more than 100,000 people, San Jose has the largest population of Vietnamese outside of Vietnam. When the character Mrs. Hoa, who we later learn lost a husband and two sons to battle, comes to the narrator’s mother’s grocery store to ask her for a donation to support South Vietnamese soldiers training in Thailand to try to retake their country, his mother refuses. “You’re nothing but a thief and an extortionist, making people think they can still fight this war,” she tells Mrs. Hoa.

Mrs. Hoa turns to the other shoppers, launching the worst allegation conceivable within the refugee community: “She doesn’t support the cause. If she’s not a Communist, she’s just as good as a Communist. If you shop here, you’re helping Communists.” (The mother later donates $200 to Mrs. Hoa’s fund. Mrs. Hoa had asked for $500.) The story ends with the image of his mother, frantic after the aborted robbery in her San Jose home, “barefoot on the sidewalk… hands raised high in the air… shouting something I could not hear, demanding to be heard.”

Ironically, for many people in Vietnam and Vietnamese-Americans in America, Nothing Ever Dies and Nguyen’s other works are inaccessible; sixty percent of San Jose’s Vietnamese residents, for instance, say they don’t really speak English, according to the census. A Vietnamese translation of The Sympathizer is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year, Nguyen says; the Vietnamese government must approve any publication within Vietnam. “I only want [The Sympathizer] to be published in Vietnamese in Vietnam if it is uncensored,” the author says. If the federal government prohibits that, he would consider publishing it in full in Vietnamese online, even though he wouldn’t make any money. “I want the Vietnamese people to be able to read an accurate version.”

Two thirds of the way through The Sympathizer, the narrator, a Vietnamese refugee to America who is never named, discovers that a “famed Hollywood Hills Auteur,” also never named, has left the narrator’s name off the movie’s final credits. The narrator had been hired as an “authenticity” consultant to make the movie, which is set in Vietnam (though not filmed there). The same filmmaker, the narrator believes, earlier tried to kill him during filming. “Failing to do away with me in real life, he had succeeded in murdering me in fiction, obliterating me utterly in a way that I was becoming more and more acquainted with,” the narrator fumes. As he watches the credits slip by with no mention of him, he is filled with a “boiling murderous rage.”

The author admits his own real-life anger—about his lost country and heritage, about his parents’ soul-sapping struggles, about American lies to the Vietnamese—but describes it as “a pilot light” that illuminates deeper insight and enhances his writing: “When I look around the United States, there are so many injustices that it’s difficult not to be angry.” Citizens who aren’t maddened by the contradictions between the nation’s claims of equality amid the rampant inequalities are “unaware, or refuse to be aware.”

Sharon Simonson is a Silicon Valley journalist and writer. She is earning her masters of fine arts degree in nonfiction creative writing at San Jose State University, where she is managing editor of Reed Magazine, the oldest literary journal in California and the West.

It’s the only story ever written about a bloodthirsty bobcat with opposable thumbs who fights against a ragtag band of humans on behalf of an army of giant ants. Set in the same world as Mort(e) and its soon-to-be-released sequel, D’Arc, this is a crucial episode in Repino’s series about the War With No Name, a brilliantly bonkers cross between Watership Down and old Rambo movies, whose real-life political undertones grow more relevant each day.

We asked the author one question.

How are you celebrating the publication of Culdesac?

I feel a bit odd celebrating the debut of Culdesac when I’m still reeling from last week’s apocalyptic news. My agent reminded me that the novella might be fit for the times, being a revenge fantasy in which humans are brutally punished for their cruelty and shortsightedness. So I got that going for me.

Robert Repino

Adding to my discomfort is the fact that I’m getting a minor surgery the following day, which will put me out of commission for at least the rest of the week. I will be giving my surgeon a copy of Mort(e) and Culdesac because he struck me as a science fiction nerd. It’s a little pretentious, but since he’ll be doing a Fantastic Voyage on me, I might as well get him a gift.

I’ve been holding off on the post-election self care in which so many others have indulged, so my recovery will be a time to Netflix (with no chill) while I tweet about the book, and continue copyediting the sequel, D’Arc. When I’m back on my feet, I’ll be working as a guest bookseller at Astoria Bookshop as part of their Small Business Saturday on November 26. Given all the stuff going on, I consider that to be the real celebration. We shall see if I recall anything useful from my days at Borders. I expect to scare some people off when I tell them that Culdesac eats a guy in chapter one. Should be fun.